Dave Hickey On Critique

"My one rule is that I do not do group crits. They are social occasions that reinforce the norm. They impose a standardized discourse. They privilege unfinished, incomplete art... If you're not sick, don't call the doctor... I don't care about an artist's intentions. I care if the work looks like it might have some consequences."

Perhaps it is that they not only privilege but promote incomplete art. How often is it that we present our work in what we would call its most finalized, properly presented state? Although I some times agree that a work of art is never finished, why do we not more often take it upon ourselves to present it as such? Or come up with an alternative to the customary critique ritual?

Cricket Sonata No.1

The moon was battling the thick clouds,
Threating to sufficate and extinguish it's life.
The ripples of clouds were beautifully strange,
imitating the pllowed fields below.

And then the clouds won,
and the crickets sang their lament.

© Mandie E. Lousier

Collaborators,

I'm trying to do research on collaborations to understand the nature of the act in which I'm participating.  Anybody have any names for me?  They don't have to be photographers by any means.  So far I've been researching:

Gilbert & George (there are some amazing videos of the duo in Milwaukee on this page of MAM's site)
Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison
Mike & Doug Starn
Lindsey Lockman & Barbara Ciurej
Triiibe

...and I've talked briefly with Bob Smith about his collaboration with Jon Horvath. Preferably I'd like to know of longer term collaborations, not just for one project.  Help me, please!

Rose

Senior Year

So this post is a little late, but it has truly begun. I felt the buzz that first Tuesday when we all entered the new senior studio, back together again.
Let us make of this a productive year. As Tara said in conversation, let us "Build our islands." Let us live and create and enjoy and work hard and inspire one another and be inspired. Let us find what holds our fascination, what will sustain us from now until the end of our days. Let us never stop asking questions. Let us discuss these and find amongst one another challenges to our views in order to expand and to grow.

Let me begin this discussion by proposing a question: What would you be doing if there was no such thing as a camera?

This week: Haggerty Internship and the Humanity of the Moment by Aryn Kresol

Today I began my summer internship at the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University in Milwaukee. I most definitely have a fun, interesting, engaging, challenging, and educational few months ahead of me and I am quite excited. There was no time wasted as I was pulled into an exhibition meeting just moments after my arrival. I have a long list of artist names to explore. After the meeting my time was spent attempting to learn staff names, reading, writing, and learning a little bit about the museum computer cataloging system (which every one is learning since it is new).

I was ecstatic upon seeing a piece in the current exhibition, one by photographer Ruth Bernhard (featured in my Collect.Select.Reflect collection on my personal blog: .enigmatic.intent.photography.). The piece was a lot larger than I anticipated and I later found out that it was a reprint of the original, printed thirty years later. Bernhard is among my favored photographers.


In the Box - Horizontal 1962 © Ruth Bernhard


In other news, the class that I was T.A.'d for during the spring semester is having a show of work produced over the duration of the course. The class was run in conjunction with Milwaukee Art Museum's Street Seen photography exhibition, which closed at the end of April. The Humanity of the Moment opens this Wednesday, May 26th at the Milwaukee City Hall Rotunda at 4:45pm - 7:30pm. I will be there! If you are in Milwaukee and interested in seeing some photos, come out for sure. The show runs through June 4th. Visit the MIAD site for all the info that I just gave here and more.

Surprise visit,

I saw Larry today!  I was at my internship framing some photos he walked in with a friend, apparently he's visiting Boston on business.  It was so lovely!  Definitely unexpected, I kinda freaked out.

Do you guys want to keep this blog up or are you feeling done with it?  Let me know what you think.

I'm finally done with school, ready to come back to Milwaukee!

Rose

Germany and an Installation,

So I found out the other day that I got into this Art Festival in Germany that I applied to!  Atomino is an experimental festival in south eastern Germany that has accepted artists from all over the world.  I'm so pumped! My roommate Rachel King and our friend Brett Woodward, a senior at MassArt, also got in.  So it looks like I'm going to have an exhibition in Germany in August! Here's a link to the festival's tumblr where they showcase artists that have submitted work (FYI the deadline hasn't been announced yet so there's still time for you to submit if you want to!).

Other thoughts today:
So far I haven't heard news of audio from the "Is Photography Over" talk at SFMoMA but on their blog they have some notes from the symposium.  I haven't had a chance to read much of it but I'm sure it's worth a look.  I also talked to Walead Beshty the other day after his lecture at MassArt but he wouldn't divulge much about the discussion.  All he said was roughly 'it was cool' and 'hilarious' because of the discussion on photographer vs. artist.  I tried to squeeze an answer out of him but to no avail. Disappointing.


I finished my extremely ambitious collaboration final with my friend Erika Duran (who looks like Deb) and I'm so excited about it! I think it's awesome, and we've gotten some really good responses.  It was a backlit projection onto two 24X30" thick frosted plexiglass sheets suspended from the ceiling.  We blacked out the light in the room and created audio that we played loud within the space to echo and overwhelm.  The audio was a compilation of poems we wrote and read aloud and a quiet clip of waves on a shore.  It could stand to be a bit more successful, perhaps we'll revisit it and make a better recording.  Here's a couple shots of the installation from the front and side, and a link to the audio:

suspension.mp3

Oh yeah and guess what...we're seniors!  Ohhh man!


Rose

"Is Photography Over?"

Oh man, I'm so excited to hear the audio from this discussion.  SFMoMA is holding a discussion today and tomorrow regarding the present and future of photography and it's state of existence as a valid artistic medium.  They have figures such as Charlotte Cotton (who I forgot to mention I met the last time I was in NY), Walead Beshty (who has a lecture on Monday here at MassArt), Philip-Lorca diCorcia and several others on the discussion committee.  Here's a general post in Foto8 about it as well as initial short responses by all of the panel members.

This is a big deal. As soon as the audio becomes available I'll try and post it on here, I'm sure it'll be monumental.

Also, some thoughts I've been having today.  I've been considering responsibility a lot lately.  What is my responsibility as a photographer and artist versus all the other roles I must divide myself into?  When I photograph, what responsibility to I transfer onto my subjects?  How do I differentiate between the photographs and myself?  I recently read an interview with Garry Winogrand (I've linked a pdf if you'd like to read it) and he stated:

 "What you photograph is responsible for how a photograph looks.  In other words, it's responsible for the form...the design, whatever word you want to use.  Because of that there's no way a photograph has to look, in a sense.  There are no formal rules of design that can apply."

I started thinking of this in terms of my roommate Rachel King's current undergoing.  She has been sending and handing out disposable cameras all over the US to people of varying demographics, personalities, points of view.  She asks them to take a roll of photographs of things that somehow are personal to them, that describe them in some way.  The hope of it all is to achieve a sort of self portrait of the masses and examination of how images can directly show personality.  The issue she's been having is what is her role within the piece?  Her responsibility is as organizer and collector, setting guidelines for the project, paying for the cameras, developing and scanning the images.  In the end she ends up having more of a curatorial role.  But are they her images?  To whom do they belong to?  In Sophie Calle's book Suite Venitienne Jean Bouillard writes about Calle's authorship of ideas.  Because she sets all the rules, makes the game happen in the first place the authorship of everything that happens becomes hers.  Perhaps they start somewhere as someone else's but in the process she creates the person's mind becomes her work of art.  (This was speaking specifically to her work The Big Sleep where she invited strangers to sleep next to her).  Is Rachel's process a similar authorship?  Do the people that took the images only own the action and moments in which they captured the images, plus the space they photographed?  After it's recorded on the film does it become Rachel's image?

Rose

An Incomplete Manifesto For Growth by Bruce Mau

1. Allow events to change you.
You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good.
Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.

3. Process is more important than outcome.
When the outcome drive the process we will only ever go where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we're going, but we will know we want to be there.

4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child).
Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

5. Go deep.
The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

6. Capture accidents.
The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

7. Study.
A studio is a space of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.

8. Drift.
Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacency. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

9. Begin anywhere.
John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

10. Everyone is a leader.
Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.

11. Harvest ideas.
Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.

12. Keep moving.
The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.

13. Slow down.
Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.

14. Don't be cool.
Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.

15. Ask stupid questions.
Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.

16. Collaborate.
The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.

17. _________________.
Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven't had yet, and for the ideas of others.

18. Stay up late.
Strange things happen when you've gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you're separated from the rest of the world.

19. Work the metaphor.
Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.

20. Be careful to take risks.
Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.

21. Repeat yourself.
If you like it, do it again. If you don't like it, do it again.

22. Make your own tools.
Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.

23. Stand on someone's shoulders.
You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.

24. Avoid software.
The problem with software is that everyone has it.

25. Don't clean your desk.
You might find something in the morning that you can't see tonight.

26. Don't enter awards competitions.
Just don't. It's not good for you.

27. Read only left-hand pages.
Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our "noodle."

28. Make new words.
Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.

29. Think with your mind.
Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.

30. Organization = Liberty.
Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between "creatives" and "suits" is what Leonard Cohen calls a 'charming artifact of the past.'

31. Don't borrow money.
Once again, Frank Gehry's advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It's not exactly rocket science, but it's surprising how hard it s to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.

32. Listen carefully.
Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.

33. Take field trips.
The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV sets, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic-stimulated environment.

34. Make mistakes faster.
This isn't my idea - I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.

35. Imitate.
Don't be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You'll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp's large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.

36. Scat.
When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else ... but not words.

37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.

38. Explore the other edge.
Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can't find the leading edge because it's trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.

39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms.
Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces - what Dr. Seuss calls "the waiting place." Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all the infrastructure of a conference - the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals - but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.

40. Avoid fields.
Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.

41. Laugh.
People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I've become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.

42. Remember.
Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That's what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.

43. Power to the people.
Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can't be free agents if we're not free.

thought.

© Mandie Lousier

This is a repercussion of thought. This is the delicate time between each thought, and the mesmerizing rhythm between quietness and thinking. This is peaceful tranquility visualized, a time where all that can be done is to breath in the fresh air and feel.

Something new I have been working on and finally a combination of night and day.

Thesis,

What's it like?  Tell me about it!  I skyped the opening on Wednesday to say hi to the seniors but couldn't really see the work because of video quality. Plus I only saw a small fraction.  Whose work do you like, what went wrong, is the show as a whole good?

I came across a blog with work and interviews from MassArt's seniors, it's interesting. Take a look.

side note: I met the Triiibe triplets last night, if you're not familiar you should take a look.  They're performance artists who realize their performances as photographs, they have a team of people working with them to create absolutely amazing pieces.  Their photographer, Cary Wolinsky, is fantastic as are their makeup artist, editor, set designer and framer, among many others that work with them on occasion. I met them at a curator and collector opening for their current show at Gallery Kayafas. The show is astounding, the prints are perfectly pristine, quite huge and each is framed differently to accentuate the photographs. Also, each print is a unique object, there are no editions in the Triiibe world.  Once a print gets bought, the next one up for sale is visually altered in some way, changing the concept of the image as well as the physical art object. I love that idea, sometimes I get so put-off by editions.  It's a strange hierarchy of reproductions. Anybody have thoughts on editions?

Rose

Grounded,

I've been becoming more comfortable with this new series of mine, which as of now I've dubbed Grounded.  I was just able to display it at Boston's First Friday event in the studio where my internship is.  Here are a few images that I'm most settled with of the work-in-progress.

all © Rose Tarman

In the art community, a landscape has always been understood as a specific scene in nature, void of human presence and typically are-inspiring in beauty.  Why does a traditional landscape have to be perceived as a wide-angle view of a gracious mountainside, endless field or whatever else people like to look at?  Why should I care about that scene?  I contest that a contemporary landscape can be infinitely more than that, without the traditional understanding of land and space.  The places I photograph collectively speak of human connection, abstraction of location and have a level of ambiguity that allows them to be associated with a variety of experiences.  They speak to a deeper and more rounded understanding of the spaces I travel through and inhabit through the comparisons and contrasts within their pairings and groupings.

 

At First Friday:

Rose

Considering Collaboration,

Lately I’ve been collaborating quite a bit, something that I honestly never saw myself doing seriously in the past, or at least had never had the idea of considering previously.  But now I honestly I think it’s something that I will continue to consider.

My first collaboration came out of friendship and a mutual understanding of work ethic and interest.  My roommate Rachel King and I decided to take a journey together and photograph our experience within the place.  We traveled an hour north on the train to Lawrence, Massachusetts.  We haven’t finalized anything from the trip yet, we’ve just chosen the best images, scanned and edited them.  Here's a sprinkling of random images.

all above © Rose Tarman/Rachel King

I’ve also done a collaboration in one of my classes, as a required assignment, but it ended up really great.  My friend Erika Duran and I combined our separate photographs into a sequence and created text to go with it.  The piece is here, with a statement:

© Rose Tarman/Erika Duran

This collaboration came about through the common thread of physical and internal aspects of sleep.  We wanted our five images to evoke the vivid, visceral moments left behind when sleeping and upon waking.  Like the imprint left on the screen after turning a television off, these traces of dreams hint at the body’s restlessness; a movement and temporal element is also referenced by the filmstrip design, so a cinematic mood avails within the piece.  The words spoken aloud access an aspect of the rhythm of sleep as well as the textural elements of the photographs.  They create a cycle of sounds, repeated and turned over, whispering from their mask of dark grey.

 

Because we thought our process worked out so well Erika and I decided to collaborate for our final project in our class.  I’m really excited about our plan for the project, but it’s proving to be extremely elaborate, technical and detailed.  There are a million factors to consider, but I think as a collaborative effort we work really well with figuring out all the details together.  I hope it works out, even if it doesn’t I think it’ll be a novel effort. Cross your fingers for us! I’m seriously really excited about it and in some ways it’ll be a departure from my regular work but I feel like it still has some thread of similarity.  I’ll leave you suspenseful, be ready for a surprise (hopefully)!

Have any of you ever tried collaboration?  If you did, did it work out well for you?

Rose

Emmet Gowin,

This past Wednesday I went to the Emmet Gowin (2) lecture at the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston.  The Museum has a survey of Harry Callahan’s work up and invited Gowin to speak about both Callahan and his own work.  Oh goodness, it was wonderful.  You know that feeling between crying and exploding—that strange lightness and strained feeling when you feel like you might lift out of your seat?  I love that feeling, I had it for the entire lecture.  Gowin is an amazing speaker; he is so deeply attached to everything in life that I don’t think he can help but talk about everything in a beautifully eloquent, romanticized, passionate way.  I thought he might start sobbing a few times throughout the evening.

Edith and Rennie Booher, Danville, Virginia, 1970 © Emmet Gowin

Callahan was Gowin’s grad teacher at RISD in the mid 60’s and they struck up a close relationship.  I never really considered the closeness of their work until it was presented to me tonight.  There are immense similarities between the two photographers’ thought processes and sensitivities.  He said that Callahan’s work exists in tandem with the Quaker saying about how our role on earth is the invention of peace, and that his work “sought to redress the frightening masculinity” of our time.  Honestly he was such an eloquent speaker, it seemed so effortless for him to use grand, beautiful statements like that.

© Harry Callahan

Gowin went on to discuss his own photographs, quoting Rilke and Faulkner most notably.  He mentioned the ideas of standing guard over the solitude of the people you’re with, something that Rilke talks about and which comes strongly across in his work, along with the idea of photographing a scene but really photographing the tragedy behind the scene.

Nancy and Dwayne, Danville, Virginia, 1970 © Emmet Gowin

At one point during his exquisite ramblings and storytelling he went on and on about Edith, his wife he photographed almost constantly, even creating her presence when her physicality wasn’t available. “The greatest distance you can ever travel is to come back to where you are,” he stated.  That is where you find “a kind of personal eternity” where you realize “where you are is where you’re supposed to be.”  It’s almost a spiritual idea, really, of finding your place in the world.  He beautifully captures his love for her, just by seeing the multitude and sensitivity of the images he makes of her you can sense the immense unbounded love he has.  She is his muse.  It’s beautiful.

I’ve failed to mention so many aspects of his talk.  If you ever get the chance to go to one, do it.  He’s retiring from his teaching career at Princeton this year, it would be lovely to attend his farewell lecture I’m sure.  At the end of the lecture I went down to the stage to thank him and he gave me a huge hug, it was cute!

Edith and Moth Flight, 2002 © Emmet Gowin

“Life itself isn’t the reality…if we did not dream, reality would collapse.” –Harry Callahan

Rose

New York,

Ok, I apologize for the extremely late updates but it’s been a crazy past few weeks.  I’m sure you feel my pain of business, I mean when are we all not busy?

The Friday before my Spring Break, March 6th, I was given the opportunity to go to New York and work at Verve Art Fair, a part of The Armory Show.  My friend Rachel King was an intern at Khaki Gallery for a few weeks and the owner of the gallery wanted us to come and help out with her space at the show, hold down the fort and grab classy clients.  So on Friday we got into New York at 4 am and found ourselves at the Dylan Hotel sleeping in the extra bedroom/storage room our gallery reserved.  We slept a couple hours, got up and walked outside to realize we were only a block and a half away from Grand Central Station, squished between Park Ave and Madison Ave.  This was for both of us our first time in New York, we were absolutely thrilled.  Everything was active; we were blocks from the Empire State, Times Square, 5th Avenue…the center of it all.  It was so exciting!

We spent our day working Verve, which was in a series of really nice rooms in the Dylan Hotel, and running around the city trying to see as much as possible.  We ended up getting free passes to Volta NY and The Armory (though we didn’t have enough time to see the latter) popped over to take a look.  Volta was so strange.  I’m really not sure how I feel about huge art fairs like that.  The booths cost a fortune, the artists honestly didn’t impress me for the most part, and it was like some strange window-shopping experience. 

Jörg Colberg of Conscientious had some interesting thoughts on fairs like Volta recently, take a look.  Of course events like Volta are great ways to see fresh new work and sell some work, but it felt so artificial.  The way I was looked at by the representatives and artists was like I was a hamburger after they’d starved themselves for a week.  They approached me like I was a buyer, which in a way was refreshing not to be dismissed for being just a student but was really strange at the same time.

© Nat Ward

Later that evening Rachel and I walked over to Affirmation Arts to see the 31 Women in Art Photography exhibit put on by the Humble Arts Foundation.  After a few distractions—we were driven like flies to porch lights to Times Square and stuffed our faces with saurkraut and sausage—we finally got there and there were two gigantic lines snaking out from the entrance and only fifteen minutes left to get in.  Luckily our dear beloved Ms. Tara Bogart was inside and was able to snag us some wristbands and get us inside immediately.  Go Tara!  We entered the space and immediately I was overwhelmed and intimidated.  Everyone was gorgeous, young and social.  The show was lined up in a way that I couldn’t see any of the work because of the model-height of so many of the attendees and the mass of the crowd swarmed in the space.  I’m so glad Tara was there!  We walked around and looked at the work, most of which I really enjoyed.  Justine Reyes was one of the picks, remember when she had her work up in the Perspectives Gallery at school?  Here’s a list of all the women and their pieces that were in the show.  Billie Mandle and Claire Beckett actually teach classes here at MassArt (honestly this school has amazing faculty!).

Unfortunately Rachel and I had to leave pretty quickly to catch our bus back to Boston.  We got into Boston at 3 am and I immediately turned around and went to the airport for my 5 am flight to San Francisco.  I’m going to have to do this in segments, I’m in the process of writing about San Francisco still.

 

Side note: my image of Jason Lazarus’ poster Try Harder that I got in the mail made it onto his website! Tom, Sarah, Mandie and Barbara, all of your photos are on the same wall so you’re on there too!

I hope your spring breaks were lovely!  I miss you all!
 

New Photo Society,

Just a notice to all: we've decided to change our group name to something a little more appropriate to our means and have settled on New Photo Society.  That means the url of this blog will be changing to newphotosociety.blogspot.com and you'll probably have to update your feed subscriptions, at least that's what I'm guessing.

Have a great Spring Break my friends!

Rose

update

My current work explores issues of my adolescence by referencing empty friendships of my past. I'm excited about the direction this work is taking me; these two images are merely a beginning of a very personal body of work.

Mandie Lousier: something new

©Mandie Lousier

This is a recent project I started for my narrative class and it is a whole new side to my photography. This is a work in progress illustrating a dream I had many years ago. I don't have a statement for these, nor do I think they really need one, just a title.

Either way this is a nice new breath of fresh air for me.

Mandie.

Try Harder,

Jason Lazarus, one of the artists I interviewed last semester, just sent me one of his Try Harder posters, and I'm so excited about it!  He's working on an ongoing project where he sends motivational posters to anyone who wants one (just send him the postage!) and in turn posts images made by recipients of the posters in a spaces that needed motivational advice.

 

 

My wall is becoming extremely motivational now!  Lazarus' poster added to the beautiful photographs of your own making! Left to right on my wall, images by: Sarah Moore, Mandie Lousier, Tom Owens, myself, Barbara Vonderhaar, and myself again, plus some exhibit postcards of shows I've seen (Colin Matthes, Amy Stein, America Now, Henry Horenstein, Lisa Olson). 

Many exciting things are about to happen for me, but I don't want to jinx myself and talk about them before they happen...so you'll just have to wait in suspense.  I find myself focusing on so many things other than classes, but I feel like I'll get way more out of those other things in the long run.  I'm trying to get a hold of a voice recorder to start recording some of the artist talks I hear and post them up on here.  We'll see how that pans out...

Rose

Artist?

Ok, so tonight... I realize it is 4 in the morning, but I feel like I need to share...

























I was in a roughly 3 hr debate with a drawing major, a video major, and my self (photo), I'll just not say who they are. Anyway, we talked about "what is "art"?"... huge...central idea...different mediums...technology...time...ON AND ON...

I think we came to a conclusion, at least I thought, (there was alot of debate and drunkin yelling), that "ART" is... "the way one perceives reality or wants to protray reality through ones own thought and ideas and the conscious decisions that make it in that way"...I might have messed it up a little, but it was something like that.

I know this is very vague, but does it make sense? I mean to think about "art" not just as photography or just one medium? Isn't this what we should all want to achieve?

I guess what we were trying to define is, should it be so defined? or should it be different form lets say: drawing/painting to video to photography Etc. ? Should it start here and branch off?

It might be hard to have a "debate" on here but let me know what you think.
Good food for thought.


Is this what junior year is about???


~tom

Musing,

 

© Emmet Gowin

Why aren’t there more circular images out there?  This is an idea I’ve been considering for a long time but am finally starting to get fed up with.  The fact that I cannot create documents in Photoshop (or really any program that I know) that aren't rectangular bothers me immensely.  And I don't mean fisheye lenses or sneaky editing maneuvers; I mean a straight, more traditional angle photograph with traditional (or contemporary, whatever you'd like to let it exist as) associations in a non-traditional geometric format.  Why can’t photographs exist outside of the box they live in now?  No matter what we can’t escape it, cameras capture photographs the way we originally made them to, in the shape of a sheet of paper.  We’ve tried to get around it by cropping out the edges, only allowing the viewer to see parts of an image, but viewers are never fooled.  They’ve been trained to understand the format of a photograph, the reality of the rectangle.  They see our attempts as false.  Why aren’t there any circular films, either?  Why can’t we exist organically instead of within this man-made box?

I’ve found few examples of circular photographs, coming from creationists (not in the fundamental sense) such as the AES group’s heavily manipulated Last Riot series and pinhole photographers like Thomas Hudson Reeve and the random unknowns like Dipploid, who we view as experimentalists.  The origins of photography hold a few circular photographers, but it seems that idea was abandoned quickly.  I came across an entry in Alec Soth's Archived Blog where he speaks to these ideas and gives some particularly great examples of circular photographs.  He quotes Emmet Gowin after he came to the realization he could leave the circular images the way they are without cropping them into a rectangle:

"Accepting the entire circle, what the camera had made, was important to me. It involved recognition of the inherent nature of things. I had set out to describe the world with my domain, to live a quality with things. Enrichment, I saw, involves a willingness to accept a changing vision of the nature of things – which is to say, reality. Often I had thought that things teach me what to do. Now I would prefer to say: As things reach us what we already are, we gain a vision of the world." 

I’d like to attempt to make my own non-rectangular photographs sometime.  At the moment I won’t because it’s not something that my photography needs for expression, it’ll be without meaning if I do it now.  Someday, perhaps.

© Dipploid (image from a pinhole camera made from a pine nut)

Apart from my rant, today was impressively full of education for me.  I learned how to drum scan!  And oh my goodness is it labor and time intensive!  I have pages and pages of notes on how to scan one black and white, 35mm image.  It took hours for the process to get to a point where beautifully unedited files existed on the hard drive, waiting for Photoshop.  If anyone wants to know the process, I'll definitely detail it, I had no idea what it was all about until today.

Rose

Katie Kmet: Progress.

Loss of Dependency ©Kathryn Kmet

I've been struggling for the past 2 years trying to figure out what I'm truly interested in. I am exploring the struggle of self image of males and females. With this progression, I am expressing myself, and my past and present. I feel I am finally excited to continue with a subject.

Tom Owens: work in progress.

Here is what I have been working on lately. I havent been able to shoot nearly as much as I would like, but you know how that goes... 

 

© Tom Owens

this is kind of the latest artist statement.

In this unfamiliar industrialized area everything around you seems to be in some sort of decay or wear and tear. Expensive metal equipment and big structures begin to fall to nature’s strengths over time. This equipment is either frequently used or completely forgotten. All these things are sure evidence of man, but the absence of life during these hours in these vast spaces almost creates an eerie and unsettling feeling.

I am interested in the transformation that happens at night when nothing is being used and every thing looks lifeless. This industrialized area, to me, becomes almost surreal, creating a vast space that has no end. Taking away any form of human presence and using the colors of the night almost like a mask, my intention is to create beauty out of deterioration.

Tom Owens

I dont know, I still think its a little cheesy, especially at the end there... I think that deterioration should be part of it, but maybe not that strong. I dont know. I've been talking with Larry quite abit. My work is really consistent but I just need to work out the thinking part. I guess many of us have that problem. I have been trying to read alot of interviews of night photographers (alot s actually not that many, they are hard to find), but larry thought it may be a good idea to look at "daytime" photographers that work in the same "style", or use the same type of "lighting" or something like that. If anyone has any suggestions, on the work or photographers to look at, please let me know!


Thanks

Work,

 © Rose Tarman

I'm putting this up for crit on Wednesday in my Word & Photographic Image class.  I'm sure where it's heading yet but I'm liking it thus far.  I'm still formulating what I'm trying to get at with it, for Wednesday it'll have text with it (not a statement or anything, creative text) but I'm not done with that yet.  Any thoughts or suggestions?  I know it's difficult because I haven't explained it, but I need some feedback without my associations I think.

It'll take several of these for me to figure out what I want them to be, I need to make more.

Rose

Inspiration,

I've been thinking a lot about inspiration.  The other day I was asked to bring something in to class that inspires me, something non-photographic.  I completely froze up.  That should be easy, right?  But I can't bring in something cheesy like a photograph of friends of family or a boyfriend, that's not me.  I can't bring in books because I don't have any with me and honestly books are just a bunch of words that pass through me, some stick and some don't.  Clothes don't inspire me so that was out of the picture.  I was stuck, I barely brought anything with me to Boston.

I considered what it really means to be inspired by something.  I was set on this heavy, mind-blowing awe that comes over you, something that makes you DO and THINK. That has to be inspiration.  Then I thought over all the things that I have in my life, things I've experienced.  But inspiration doesn't always strike down like lightning, if at all.  It's little things, all around that group together and feel a certain way. It isn't material goods that inspire me.  It's something more abstract, something that I find in true friends, the way the light reflects on my window, the way I can almost feel my mind expand when I'm told something amazing, the way my heart explodes sometimes.  How could I ever capture that and bring it in to class?

What is inspiration particularly supposed to do anyway?  My photographs don't come out of some particular event, a book I read or a person I spoke with.  I can't be inspired by something and make it what I constantly think about for a project, it doesn't make me do anything immediate or substantial.  I work more organically than that, things come together with pushes and pulls, accumulation of experiences help me grow and stretch my process. 

I suppose none of this is actually coming to a point.  I guess I just freaked out.  When asked that question I felt like I should know exactly what to bring, what it meant to me and what to say about it.  I don't know if that's possible for me.

I think my answer is this:

I find inspiration in accumulation.

I think that's all I could really tell people.

 

© Rose Tarman 

Rose

Jen Davis

© Jen Davis

I was just taking a look around Jen Davis' website and stumbled on her new work in progress. And I must be honest, I fell in love with it, it is incredibly personal, revealing, and intimate in such a strange way. It also surprisingly for myself in some way was very uncomfortable, which is hard to do. I think about how honest this is to love that exists today, perhaps through meeting a stranger and falling in love or perhaps having a long distance relationship and how we use technology to be able to connect, so we can have the love we want as close as possible.

-Autumn Elizabeth Clark

Rose is still at MIAD!

You bet, used my phone, classic blackberry pics

I dont think these will move from the wall. If they do, heads will roll!
haha.

Magda Biernat

I found this on conscientious. Its really interesting work, click on a series, then the artist statement. I really like "inhabited" and "quietly forgotten".
She talks about the series "inhabited" and that between 2007 and 2008 she traveled around the world to like 17 countries! damn that would be sweet! Anyway, hah,






















© Magda Biernat

I like this part in the statement alot- "The world's cultures may be very different, but when seen through a consistent lens in terms of simple geometry, the complexities of cultural variation fall away. Here I turn my camera onto the ordinary details of everyday life, past the complexities of race, religion or cultural differences and onto the similarities of the mundane."

© Magda Biernat

I think that the part about the "consistent lens" is very interesting and important to the way we all photograph. Making things cohesive guess you could say.


~ Tom Owens